What Are The Gobshites Saying These Days?

Welcome back to our survey of the state of Our National Dialogue which is, of course, what Liszt would have come up with had he composed Variation On A Fork In A Wall Socket By Diabelli.

It is not often that the blog takes this opportunity to address the gobshites directly but, since it was rather directly involved with the events of the past week, it has something it would like to say to the various cats 'n kittenz who spent Sunday morning talking earnestly about what all of "us" must have been feeling about the crime spree launched hereabouts by the Tsarnaev brothers.

Please, for the love of almighty god, shut the fk up.

I mean, seriously, padlock the pieholes. We are fine. We are muddling through. We are carrying on. We are getting up this morning and going about the business of our lives. We are riding the T, or driving on the Pike, or walking along open paths along the Charles River. We are eating lunch at Donohues or shopping at the Target in the Watertown Mall. (OK, some of us are still doing some rubbernecking at the several crime scenes.) We are dealing with the fact that Copley Square, the center of practically everything, is still something of a crime scene. (We're getting a little grumpy about it, but that's what we do here.) Our kids are going back to school. And we are doing all these things without particularly needing the pity, concern, or the Very Deep Thoughts of a pack of Green Room school nurses seeking to coin what we've all been through into their own unique brand of banality. We are not children here, and neither are our children.

So, put a sock in it, folks, OK? Things were particularly bad yesterday on Disco Dave's Disco Dance Party, where the Dancin' Master trotted out Doris Kearns Goodwin, Tom Brokaw, The Man Who Discovered World War II, Peggy Noonan and the voices in her head, and some other folks and, between them, they accomplished the not inconsiderable feat of making the events of the last week here sound like Mr. Rogers Neighborhood on lockdown.

GREGORY: In Boston, you stay calm, you carry on, and you go see the Red Sox and you sing Sweet Caroline. And Doris Kearns Goodwin is here. She was not at the game, but she would have been singing.

No, you don't. Bite me. You stay calm and carry on and go see the Red Sox and buy a beer and wonder how in the hell this team is going to score any runs this year and when Clay Buchholz's annual back injury will occur. I have no doubt Doris "would be singing," though. That's why I'm glad we sit in different parts of the 'yard.

KEARNS GOODWIN: We were in a bar the night they got caught and we were watching them when he finally comes out an — and they got him. Everybody was just screaming, as thank God, we have got him alive, because they want the answer to the question, why? And then to see the final day back at Fenway, people not afraid to go out in massive numbers, singing Sweet Caroline, the Yankees sung it, too..

There are two kinds of people who follow the Sox. The ones that think "Sweet Caroline" is iconic, and actual fans. These groups are mutually exclusive. Luckily, though, we had Brokaw, who was able to place all we've been through in the "Long View Of History," which I believe is quite drunk these days and is mistaking a line of cows for the 10th Armored Division.

Well, what I see is an opportunity for the American citizens to get involved in trying to do something about the culture of violence that has become such a large part of our lives, whether it's guns or whether this kind of an attack or whatever it is we are living with it. We're living with the violent video games, for example, that we see. I do think that this is an opportunity for this country to step forward and say I want to be part of that debate and I think that the president could help ignite that in a meaningful way and pull the country together however you decide your voice ought to be heard in that debate. This is the time for us to have that debate.

Actually, we were all waiting for Best Buy to reopen in the Watertown Mall so we could all go back and buy Call Of Duty. What is it with these clowns and the video games? And. I'm not sure if Tom missed it, but we had that debate in the Senate not long ago. Violence won. It was in all the papers. And just when Brokaw was boring you into a stupor, along came la Noonan to add her uniquely addled je ne sais quoi to the proceedings.

But to Doris' point, in a funny way, these things remind places. We always say community. I say town. It reminds towns and cities that they are real, they are a place, they're full of people who care about each other and engaged with each other. They're an entity and they act together. There's something really valuable about that.

And here I was, thinking that we all were in that Twilight Zone episode where the two people are running through the empty streets and it turns out they're really in the sandbox of the giant space alien child. We say "community." Peggy says "town." You say "tomato." I say "tomahto." Peggy says "bloody Mary." Let's call the whole thing off.

Things did not improve over at This Week With The Clinton Guy Shocked By Blowjobs, although Richard Clarke once again did a great job of demonstrating (again) that George W. Bush was stupid for having benched him and his anti-terrorism expertise in favor of chasing Tommy Chong. It was the turn of the unfortunate Byron Pitts to bring The Neil.

The epicenter, if you will, was Fenway Park, this is one of America's grand old baseball stadiums and yesterday, it felt more like a cathedral. There was a pregame ceremony to honor the victims, survivors and first responders. Also one of the highlights during the eighth inning, Neil Diamond took the field to lead the crowd in his song "Sweet Caroline" Red Sox fans have been singing that song in the eighth inning of every home game since 2002. This week, Diamond's song became America's song.

Dear god, no. Never has America needed the Ramones more.

But, sooner or later, the music stops, and the stupid starts, and along comes Senator Dan Coats of Indiana, to explain to us up here that what we really need is some muscular extra-constitutional daddies to make us sleep sweetly through the night.

COATS: I think we should stay with enemy combatant until we find out for sure whether or not there was a link to foreign terrorist organizations.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Even though he's a citizen?

COATS: Even though he's a citizen. There have been exceptions to this before with the public safety issue of course on Miranda rights. But also the fact that he's traveled back to his hometown which is a Muslim area, could have been radicalized back there.

No, you're an idiot. It's Tamerlan, the dead guy, the guy who got run over in the street by his brother, who "traveled back to his homeland." I will stipulate that giving the dead guy his Miranda rights is somewhat futile. The guy in the hospital is the one who smoked a lot of weed and went to UMass-Dartmouth for the partying, and then started killing people. There are only two of them. Do try to keep them straight. Watch, however, over the next few weeks, how the younger brother becomes the proxy for the older one. What if he was "radicalized" simply by being Tamerlan's brother? It will amaze and astound you how easily it happens.

And we came to a crashing conclusion over on Face The Nation, on which former Hanseatic League defense correspondent Bob Schieffer felt compelled to ask Deval Patrick whether or not he's afraid the successful conclusion to the manhunt will cost him politically.

Bob Schieffer: Was there ever any point when you thought that people wouldn't follow your orders or your requests as it were

Deval Patrick: Well, Bob, having been in this job for six years I'm fully aware that there are knuckleheads out there and people moved around.

Hey, I resemble that remark.

Seriously, though, people. We're really doing OK. It was nice having y'all around for a week. Hope you spent a little dough. Now go home, please. We have lives to live.

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